


Pure Morning

by Aris



Series: Marvel One Shots [5]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Angst, Implied past domestic abuse, M/M, implied self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 08:32:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em> You can't sink if you're the sea, and Tony spills vodka on his leg when he tries to pour another shot. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pure Morning

Steve's angry, but hey, when isn't he?

 _When he's not around you,_ a voice murmurs in the back of his head, and Tony doesn't need a second sign to take his fourth shot of the evening. _Pessimistic inner voice, definitely not good._ Steve only frowns more when Tony downs his next shot, and the expression would have been comical if Tony couldn't feel wave after wave of dissapoint crashing into him, tugging at his sober fraction, trying to drag him under. You can't sink if you're the sea, and Tony spills vodka on his leg when he tries to pour another shot.

Steve walks out.

It's fine.

Natasha just rolls her eyes, heavy winged eyeliner smudged on her left eye and the rep lipstick she'd applied several hours earlier clinging to Clint's face, her lips red from a different kind of sin. Tony smiles, wide and warm, at her, trying for some kind of positive reaction from his bandmates. Clint snorts, bemused, and takes his own drink from the bottle of Jack at his side. Natasha licks at his mouth for a taste. Tony doesn't get a smile back.

The ocean laps at his brain.

He's not sure how much later it is, but he's on the bus, sprawled across the sofa of the diner booth, watching Thor snor against the dark grey carpet. His come to is sudden and stunning, and he blinks dumbly at the blonde before feeling the cold hand pressed to his neck, really feeling it, and looks up to a star-washed Loki staring out the bus of the window.

Tony thinks that Loki could inspire him for a lifetime. There's something about the slight curve to his cheekbones, about the dips in his body where there shouldn't be any, something alluring about the shadows heavily cast under his eyes and the cloudy tinge to his dry lips. He's attractive in all the wrong ways, shallow and deep and never ending, cutting himself short of eternity with eyes so green they remind Tony of his mother's rings. The one they decorated her corpse with. Loki's got this smile, that tantalizing, painful smile that makes Tony think about the time Thor got so angry he slapped his little brother, of the blood Loki spit on the floor, of the taunting stretch of lips that accompanied his brothers pain. Loki liked being proved right.

"Not many people can pass out with their eyes open."

The voice is soft and low, almost soothing, and Tony shakes himself from his staring, feeling a smile start to form.

"Just admiring the view." replies Tony easily, pulling himself into an upright position and leaning heavily on Loki's shoulder, sensing the strain running up his lower back while he briefly caught sight of Loki's view from the darkened window. The scenery flashed by, fleeting and almost completed swallowed by the suffocating night, stars the only reprieve from the suppressing nothing, the only bright eyed saviours. 

He could do with a saviour.

"The night," Loki tells him, and Tony knows it's for him because Loki curls a hand round his arm, pulls him closer with cold-wrung bone, "has a way of heart-heartedly concealing things. A glimpse of a tree, the shadow of a bat, a flash of an animals eyes..." he trails off, grip lessening all of a sudden, and Tony feels there was something more to it, something that would complete it, make his point absolute.

But with all things, Loki stops before it's finished. Leaves the painting to paint itself, the story to branch off in wild and wonderful directions, spiraling in imagination and bounding with the leaps of flawed logic and chance events. Tony sometimes thinks it's a reflection of his character, the nagging sense of something lacking that clings to Loki like a cat to a mouse, doggedly pinching his brain in the early hours of the morning, forcing the shadows of his eyes to grow and spread like the disease that takes seat in his mind, the overcast tinge to every thought and feeling.

Tony tastes salt when he kisses Loki's cheek, and iron when he kisses his wrist. The flavours contrast in a way so human Tony can only yearn for more, but wish it from other things than tears and blood. Something less hard won by despair but fought for with kisses and touches, begged for with soft words and sharp moans. He wants to draw the iron from his blood and the salt from his body with his teeth and his tongue, with the caresses Loki will only ever accept while locked in the embrace of alcohol, dancing with the thrill of drugs.

He leans forward, to taste the cigarettes on Loki's breathe, to taste the undertones of a spice he knows Loki hasn't eaten today, A spice that flares the sparks in his eyes, the glow to his skin, unaided by dying stars. 

But Loki pulls away further, hand sliding down to his wrist, thumb lying comfortable on Tony's pulse point. Counting the seconds.

"No, Tony." and he sounds sad, so fucking sad, with the way the light catching on his face and those impossibly green eyes staring down at his lap, like a neglected child once more rejected. Tony knows if he pushed enough, started something physical, Loki would say yes, would give in. He'd heard Thor's whispering and Loki's scared eyes, and seen the men with a sharp cut to their face and callouses in all the wrong places, for hitting and grabbing and hurting. He couldn't do that, though. Not to Loki. Never to Loki. He just wants to hold him, to wring the grief from his veins in a way that it would never come back, not if he could help it.

"We could-" 

"No," says Loki, all starshine and sad eyes, "we can't."

Tony waits for the sun rise with him, feeling for Loki's own pulse with the underside of his weathered hand, hoping for something more than _just existing_ in Loki's timid heartbeat.

**Author's Note:**

> [hit me up on tumblr ^-^](http://norsed.tumblr.com)


End file.
